Many of today's telecommuters are knowledge workers who require substantial communications to perform their jobs. The research presented investigates the nature of communication links between individuals in two work groups comprised of both telecommuters and nontelecommuters. Communication network analysis is used to map the communications in the groups and identify blocks of individuals. Blocks are groups of individuals with high levels of communication linkages among them. Work setting, gender, job type, tenure, and number of telecommuting days are investigated as potential factors in determining individuals' membership in blocks. There appears to be a tendency for telecommuters to communicate more with other telecommuters as well as for females to communicate more with one another. However, only job type was statistically related to block membership. These results indicate that there is a limited impact of telecommuting on the communication structure of work groups, which should reduce potential concerns of telecommuters about being left out of the office network. They should also reduce managers' concerns about having knowledge transfer and assimilation of corporate culture differences between telecommuting and nontelecommuting employees.

Although the search for a reliable, quantitative measure of the maturity of written composition antedates LaBrant's (1933) subordination index, it was not until Hunt's (1965) identification of the T-unit that quantitative measures of sentence and clause length factors could be demonstrated to be valid, reliable indices of maturity. Following Hunt's exploration of the T-unit, several researchers attempted to design measures embodying linguistic features beyond clause and sentence length factors which indicate the maturity of written composition. Such scales include Botel and Granowsky's (1972) formula for measuring complexity: A directional effort, Endicott's (1973) proposed scale for and Golub and Kidder's (1974) syntactic density score.